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Your Hosts at the Front Door
A Guided Tour
Welcome to our house! We'll start our tour from here on the front porch. As we go, there will be pictures of nearby areas. If you study them carefully, you may get a sense of how the house fits together. If you need to see the house from the outside, click on the picture of us at the front door. That takes you to the "setting moon" picture. Then click on that picture and you will see the entire house in full daylight. Each time you click on one of those house pictures, you will go to the other picture. When the "moon" picture is on display click "Take a Tour" to get back here. Now, let's begin.
First, we have to get into the house, but there are no keys! Did you notice the mechanical keypad (no batteries) at the left of the front door? This is the only door that opens from the outside (except the electric garage doors). By the way, the code for the keypad is easy to change.
Once inside you are standing on a flagstone entry area with a coat closet that contains a handy bench for taking off your shoes. Oh, a few people leave them on, but it's more comfortable on the deep pile carpets to walk around in your stocking feet.
Turning left, you pass the piano on your way into the living room. There's a picture of this area on another page. The living room is on a "floor" with the entry area. You have to climb about six steps to the kitchen and dining level, or descend about nine steps to the media room and billiard room (containing a 4-1/2 x 9 foot pool table).
The house contains no fewer than nine separate sets of stairs. I'll try to explain where they are as we go along. For now, we're in the living room, and we only had to step up a few inches to get in the front door from the porch.
The living room ceiling is at the same height as the kitchen and dining room ceilings, and they are at ten feet on a floor six steps up from the living room. So, the living room ceiling is very high. The south-facing windows in the living room go from the floor to the ceiling, so there is a lot of glass! There are seven pairs of windows. The bottom windows are screened and open outward. They are designed so that the rain won't come in even when they are open. The upper window in each pair is about ten feet high and has a shade that can be let down to cut down the sun. Sometimes in the winter, when the sun is low, you almost need dark glasses to be comfortable in the living room. In the summer, the sun is blocked by an overhang (which you can see in the picture of the house). This design keeps the house cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter than it might otherwise be.
A side note: When the air is warmed by the sun it rises to the ceiling of the top floor where a huge return air duct allows it to be circulated into the cooler north-facing rooms of the house. The open architecture of the house and a home automation system make this a very effective way to use the solar gain.
Now, just to the right of the living room fireplace, we'll climb about five steps past a flagstone shelf that holds a large jade plant, and come to the kitchen and dining level. The kitchen, to the right, is at the very center of the house. Standing at its circular counter you can look down through the living room and into the valley below the house. This is an elevated version of the view from the living room. You can't see any other houses from here, but you can occasionally see a few hundred elk grazing in the valley.
The kitchen is small but very efficient. There is lots of cupboard and counter space, but more than two people tend to crowd it. The dining room is only a few steps away, and it doubles as the breakfast area. There is a sunroom on the floor above, but we have never gotten used to eating anywhere else but in the dining room.
The dining room is large enough for twelve, and it has a built in buffet and china cabinet as well as a TV and the home automation control panel behind a sliding door.
Another side note: We don't like chandeliers, but we do like light. The dining room and kitchen both have lots of overhead floodlights, and there are lights built into the ceiling or sconce lights high on the wall all over the house. Most of the lights can be controlled by the home automation system as well as by numerous switches.
There are five sets of stairs that lead from the kitchen dining level. One leads up, and a second one leads down from the east side of the kitchen. These would be to the right of the kitchen area when looking up at the kitchen from the living room. Another leads down to the left side of the living room from the dining room. A fourth set of stairs (five steps) leads to a mudroom that is the entry way from the garage. The mudroom has a bench for putting on and taking off shoes, it has a large coat rack, and it has several huge built in cabinets for storage.
We'll take a quick detour and go between the dining room (on our left) and the kitchen (on our right), down the steps, into the mudroom, and make a right turn through a door into the garage. The garage has been all finished with a special coating on the floor, numerous built in cabinets, and a work bench. There are two powered garage doors, but room enough for three cars, a large work area, and an alcove where I once stored three motorcycles, a fold-up motorcycle trailer, and a bicycle. Thankfully, I only have two motorcycles to store there now.
Between the mudroom and the kitchen is a laundry room (on the same level as the kitchen). The laundry room is directly below the master bedroom dressing room, and there is a laundry chute to send down dirty clothes.
The fifth set of stairs leads up from the greenhouse room, just outside the dining room, to the spa (a 900 gallon hot tub), waterfall, and plant room which is just outside the master bedroom.
Let's go through the dining room and out into the greenhouse room. This wing of the house is on the left looking at the large photo of the full house (on another page). The greenhouse is a two story wing of the house designed to contain and care for plants. It also contains a spa with a rather unique waterfall. Under control of the home automation system, the spa can be made to circulate, the waterfall can be made to operate, and air can be blown through the falls, drawn in from the outside or from within the house.
From the lower level of the greenhouse, we climb that fifth set of stairs to a landing. This is another area for plants. It has a plant alcove to one side. Then, another set of stairs continues up to the upper area of the greenhouse. This has a large plant watering basin with an extensive automatic watering system that is too complicated to explain here.
The upper level of the green house leads (up two more steps) into the master bedroom. The large portals between the upper level and the bedroom and the lower level and the dining room can be closed with electric roller shades. These are primarily useful to direct the flow of air (and humidity) into the upper or lower parts of the house (or contain the air within the greenhouse).
Continuing on into the master bedroom, we are now on the top floor of the house, one floor up from the kitchen, and two floors up from the billiard room. Except for the roller shade that can close off the greenhouse, there are no doors to close off the master bedroom from the rest of the house. Standing in the bedroom area, you do have to go through a sliding door to get into the dressing area, and then through another door to get to a toilet and shower. The dressing area has built in drawers and shelves, and a large clothes closet behind mirrored sliding doors. It also has a sink and counter with its own mirror. Just to the right of the door leading into the shower and toilet is a bench that can be lifted up to expose the laundry chute. Set into the ceiling of the dressing room is a pull down ladder that allows access to the "attic" (where we store luggage, and which provides access to a large exhaust fan, vent, and main return air duct).
Back in the main bedroom, we continue past the fireplace and down a gallery with shelves to the left (north) and windows to the right (south). At the end of the gallery on the left is a powder room (toilet, sink, counter, mirrors). On the right is a door that leads out to a large deck over the living room. In front of us is the sunroom. This is the "box" that appears on the right in the large photo of the entire house.
Turning left, we descend a set of stairs to the study and guest room level. The guest room is directly ahead at the bottom of these stairs. It is closed off with a Shoji screen (a large pocket door) that is usually open. It has a window seat and a large built in TV cabinet.
After coming down from the sunroom, we'll look into the guest room and continue our tour by turning left into a hall with floor-to-ceiling book shelves on both sides. Partway down this hall, on the right, is the guest bathroom. It is the only bathroom in the house with an actual bath tub. This is a large tub with a Jacuzzi. There is also a shower area next to the tub. This bathroom has two sinks with a large counter separated from the toilet, tub, and shower by a pocket door.
Side note: An alternate way of using the house would be to make the guest room the master bedroom, and have foldout couches on the top level and in the media room for guests.
The guest bathroom has three skylights overhead, and three small windows above the tub.
Continuing past the guest bathroom, the hall with bookcases on both sides leads into the "third" bedroom, which is actually a large study. The book cases continue on the left side as you enter this room. The three walls to the right, except for a closet to the immediate right as you enter the room, consist of a large built in desk. This desk is huge! It has three work areas with overhead lighting. Two of these areas look out of a north facing window at a beautiful view (depicted on another page of this site). The desks have drawers, cabinets, and files built into them. There are also holes at the back for wires, cables, and power cords. Currently there are several computers and printers on the desk.
Now, from the study, we have to retrace our steps back through the "library" hall to the stairs that lead down to the kitchen level from just outside the guest room and down below the sunroom. These stairs, both the ones leading up to the sunroom and the ones leading down to the kitchen, and then the set that continues back to the living room, and finally, reversing course, a set that leads to the media and billiard room level, are all contained in a single "light well" that extends from the ceiling of the sunroom to the floor of the media room. Close to 30 feet, I'd guess.
Our tour concludes by going all the way down these stairs (who needs a stairmaster?) to the media room. Here is a built in cabinet that contains all the stereo equipment that powers the speakers in the living room, master bedroom, and billiard room. There is also a large built in TV cabinet on the other side of the room.
Going from the media room into the billiard room, we pass through one of the few swinging doors inside the house. Very few other rooms are separated by a door that we keep closed. The billiard room looks a little like a bar inside, and it is designed for playing serious pool. It also has its own bathroom, complete with a shower. This shower has been useful when we have a "guest overflow" and need an area for teenagers or children to separate themselves from the adults.
Well, that's the tour folks. All except for the secret rooms behind the hidden panels. But we can't have everyone knowing where those are, can we?